3 ms·

i'm a drop out so i may be biased, but my experience of software developers with doctorates is that they are very consistently not as good as self taught junior

by jheriko 11y ago

i'm a drop out so i may be biased, but my experience of software developers with doctorates is that they are very consistently not as good as self taught juniors in the workplace. this makes sense.. a doctorate is a research effort with a very different kind of end goal to the typical workplace environment. its an opportunity to explore the field and do work that most employers will never let you - but more importantly the skill set required is, imo, highly orthogonal to the skills require for day-to-day 'boring' work. why do people expect doctorates to result in employment outside of academia? they are poorly suited to this by design... and afaik its completely intentional because of the aforementioned difference in skill requirements.

argonaut 11y ago
There's another selection bias at play: the really good PhD's in CS who didn't go to academia and aren't doing research at a research lab, are making millions at Google/Facebook/quant finance, and not <foo corp>.
- jheriko 10y ago
  its funny how all of the best programmers i know have quite a lot of disdain for the idea that Google or Facebook are good at engineering... their public facing code is good evidence of it too. HHVM is full of rank amatuer crappiness, as well as some fairly cool stuff... but mostly crappiness and WebRTC is an absolute nightmare to use in practice compared to most rookie efforts in the same area (and its not because of what it does, its because Google have lots of internal stuff to work around the shittiness that isn't public afaik). i've met plenty of very shitty googlers and facebookers, as well as some truly excellent ones. but i suspect you will find much better guys in games, vfx, military and finance (which at least backs up some of your point). in my experience there is a much lower tolerance for crappiness in those fields by necessity. the performance and quality bar they have to meet is orders of magnitude higher in a lot of cases...

by jheriko 11y ago

argonaut 11y ago

There's another selection bias at play: the really good PhD's in CS who didn't go to academia and aren't doing research at a research lab, are making millions at Google/Facebook/quant finance, and not <foo corp>.

jheriko 10y ago
its funny how all of the best programmers i know have quite a lot of disdain for the idea that Google or Facebook are good at engineering... their public facing code is good evidence of it too. HHVM is full of rank amatuer crappiness, as well as some fairly cool stuff... but mostly crappiness and WebRTC is an absolute nightmare to use in practice compared to most rookie efforts in the same area (and its not because of what it does, its because Google have lots of internal stuff to work around the shittiness that isn't public afaik). i've met plenty of very shitty googlers and facebookers, as well as some truly excellent ones. but i suspect you will find much better guys in games, vfx, military and finance (which at least backs up some of your point). in my experience there is a much lower tolerance for crappiness in those fields by necessity. the performance and quality bar they have to meet is orders of magnitude higher in a lot of cases...